How I prepared for it.First, I attended SANS live training last year in Vegas and then bought the bundle for 4 months which gave me a vpn access to their systems to practice/hacking.Also SANS provides their "ondemand" access for the 4 months which is a recorded training for the course and of course Ed Skoudis is amazing.

GIAC provides two practice test exams as a prep for the real thing. It is a representative of the real exam but not the real exam.I listened to all the recordings, practiced all the lab and capture the flag, reread all the five text books provided and prepared indexes for the exams since it is an open book.

Then launched for the exam which I managed to pass for the first time.

My next goal is to take the OSCP training and test but according to the reading I have done so far, it sounds like this is more challenging than the GPEN.For those who have taken the OSCP and GPEN, what is your feel? Do I have a chance or no? I have no programming knowledge but the rest of the requirments, I can get well along.

I am currently working with BT4 and practicing all the tutorial provided by the offensive sec on the metasploit unleashed in my lab.

OSCP is definitely more hands-on and technical. I'd spend some time honing your linux skills and at least getting a basic understanding of Python (free two-day course here: http://code.google.com/edu/languages/go ... index.html). Aside from that, you probably have a good enough foundation to where you can research other items as you come across them.

Bushman wrote:My next goal is to take the OSCP training and test but according to the reading I have done so far, it sounds like this is more challenging than the GPEN.For those who have taken the OSCP and GPEN, what is your feel? Do I have a chance or no? I have no programming knowledge but the rest of the requirments, I can get well along.

I am currently working with BT4 and practicing all the tutorial provided by the offensive sec on the metasploit unleashed in my lab.

Bushman

The OSCP is definitely more challenging than GPEN, no multiple choice, open book with the OSCP, just 24 hours of adrenalin, fun, pain and suffering

You definitely have a chance of successfully passing the OSCP with no prior programming skills. The PWB manual and videos are pretty good and start off at a basic level and are explained well so the content is easy to understand. You won't get spoonfed with the PWB course, but you get shown enough to get you started, additional research on your own will be very useful. Metasploit Unleashed http://tinyurl.com/243fzuh is definitely useful and recommended for the PWB course. Linux experience is also very useful as well as a knowledge of writing Bash scripts, the following sites are pretty good:http://bashscripts.org/forum/ and http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

I would recommend 60 days lab access, I found that 30 days goes by so quickly and there are plenty of hosts to exploit in the labs.

I'd say it's possible, if you're willing to learn a lot and dive deep into technical aspects of Penetration Testing, and of course spend a lot of time doing this

I would recommend some basic python skills, just so you know how the syntax looks like since it'll be valuable later on. But the most important is probably that you feel comfortable and somewhat familiar with Linux, not as in you know everything there is to know, just so you know how the console works, and how you can use tools in the console etc.